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THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 



THE PRINCIPLES OF 
THE FOUNDERS 



BY 



EDWIN D. MEAD 



ORATION BEFORE THE CITY GOVERNMENT AND CITIZENS OF BOSTON, 

AT FANEUIL HALL, JULY 4, I903 









BOSTON 
AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION 

1903 



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Copyright 1903 
American Unitarian Association 



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The letters of Washington^ Jefferson^ and Franklin^ and 
various other citations icere not read in the delivery of the 
address^ hut are printed here as the stro7ig and impressive 
confirmations of the positions taken. 



" The late M, Guizot once asked me how long I thought 
our Republic would endure. I replied^ ^So long as the ideas 
of the men who founded it contiiiue dominant.'''''' — Lowell. 

" Our city owes its existence and its power to principles 
not of yesterday, and the deeper principle will always prevail 
over whatever material accumulations.''^ — Emeeson. 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 



At the impressive New Voters' Festival, held here in 
Faneuil Hall on Patriots' Day, there was nothing more 
impressive than the words of St. Paul printed at the 
head of the program, ^'I am a citizen of no mean 
city," emphasized as they were in their application 
to the young citizens of Boston gathered here for that 
consecration service by the names of the illustrious men 
in Boston's history, — Winthrop, Adams, Webster, 
Quincy, Sumner, Emerson, Phillips Brooks, and their 
great associates, — inscribed upon the walls. I know 
of nothing that can more powerfully inspire and com- 
mand the young man as he enters his political life 
than the consciousness that he belongs to a renowned 
city and an illustrious Commonwealth, and that he 
takes his place in the privileged ranks of a proces- 
sion conspicuous and honored in history and among 
men. 

*'I am a citizen of no mean city"; '^I am a 
Eoman ! " — how proudly the words ring out from the 
lips of Paul of Tarsus ! When he said, ' ' I am a 
Eoman," Paul declared himself simply a citizen of the 
Eoman empire. How much prouder was the word 
upon the lips of Cicero or Caesar, citizens of the great 
city itself ! 

'^I am an Athenian! " — how much the word meant 
in the mouth of Pericles or of Demosthenes ! how much 



8 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

in it of pride, of persuasion, of obligation and high im- 
perative ! The thought of the historic past commanded 
the character of to-day and to-morrow. As the gods 
had been with the fathers, so must they be with the 
children. 

''Being the citizens of a great city," this was the 
appeal of Pericles to the Athenians in the dark days of 
the Peloponnesian War, "and educated in a temper 
of greatness, you should not succumb to calamities, 
however great, or darken the lustre of your fame." 
His chief incitement to heroism in the storm and 
stress of the time was gratitude and a sense of the 
city's great inheritance. "Our fathers, when they 
withstood the Persians, had no such empire as we. 
Not by good fortune but by wisdom, and not by power 
but by courage, they repelled the barbarian and raised 
us to our present height of greatness. We must be 
worthy of them." His highest tribute to those who 
fell at the beginning of the war was that ' ' they were 
worthy of Athens." "I will speak first of our ances- 
tors," he said in his famous funeral speech. He told 
how the fathers in the generations had added to their 
inheritance and through many struggles transmitted 
their empire to their sons ; and he boasted with just 
pride that the sons themselves assembled there that 
day, still most of them in the vigor of life, had chiefly 
done the work of improvement and richly endowed 
their city with all things. "Our city," he proudly 
said, "is thrown open to the world, and we never 
expel a foreigner or prevent him from seeing or learn- 
ing. Athens is the school of Hellas. We do good to 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 9 

our neighbors, not upon a calculation of interest, but 
in the confidence of freedom and in a frank and fearless 
spirit." '^We regard a man who takes no interest 
in public affairs as a useless character ; and if few of us 
are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy." 
He rejoiced in the mighty monuments which would 
make Athens the wonder of succeeding ages ; she did 
not need the praises of Homer nor of any other pane- 
gyrist. ^^Such is the city," he exclaimed, ^^for whose 
sake these men nobly fought and died ; in magnifying 
the city I have magnified them and men like them, 
whose virtues made her glorious ; and every one of 
us who survive should gladly toil on her behalf. I have 
dwelt upon the greatness of Athens because I want to 
show you that we are contending for a higher prize 
than those who enjoy none of these privileges. I would 
have you day by day fix your eyes upon the greatness 
of Athens until you become filled with the love of her ; 
and when you are impressed by the spectacle of her 
glory, reflect that this empire has been acquired by men 
who knew their duty and had the courage to do it." 

We here in the American Athens, as we like to call 
our dear old town, may read these patriotic words of 
the great Athenian statesman not only as a striking 
illustration of the present power of an appeal to a 
great past, but as a stirring exposition of the kind of 
life and public spirit which we would desire to inform 
and inspire Boston to-day as they ennobled the Athens 
of Pericles. 

What we find in Pericles, that also we find in Demos- 
thenes, and even in more marked degree. His pride 



10 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

in Athens, his reverence for her history, his devotion 
to her ideals, his shame in her shame, his lofty sense 
of the high honor and severe duty of Athenian citizen- 
ship, — this is the key to his life and to the interpreta- 
tion of his whole public policy. He had studied the 
history of Athens like no other of his time. Uniting 
in his ideal picture of Athens all that was noblest in 
that history, he sought to stir the reason and imagina- 
tion of his countrymen by it as his own were stirred. 
Disinterestedness and honor, the championship of the 
oppressed, and all magnanimous and generous qualities 
were blended in the ideal Athens which commanded 
his energies and aspirations ; and the aim of his politi- 
cal life was to make Athens ' ' identify herself with her 
best moments, and be made to feel that then she was 
most truly herself." It has been often said, and justly, 
that his great oration on ^^The Crown" is in reality 
not so much a vindication of himself as a glowing 
eulogy on the Athens that trusted him. In the ^' Phil- 
ippics," as in "The Crown," the argument is again 
and again an historical review, the familiar names and 
events of Athenian history being hurled at the assem- 
bly in swift succession, for reproof, for correction, for 
instruction in righteousness. If the rest of the world 
consented to be slaves, Athens at least must do battle 
for freedom ; that task and privilege had been won 
and bequeathed to her at great cost, through many 
dangers. '^By our fathers who met danger at Mara- 
thon ; by our fathers who stood in the ranks at Plataea ; 
by our fathers who did battle on the waters of Salamis 
and Artemision ; by all the brave who sleep in tombs 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS H 

at which their country paid the last honors," — by such 
adjurations did he seek to rouse in decHning Athens 
the heroism of the antique time. His heart burns with 
shame that the mere memories of her great past should 
not be sufficient to nerve Athens to successful resist- 
ance against the rude warrior from the north, who had 
been cradled and schooled in the meanest environment. 
^ ^ Who would dare to say that a man born and bred at 
Pella, a place at that time petty and obscure, had a 
right to such an innate grandeur of spirit as to aspire 
to the empire of Greece and to harbor the project in 
his thoughts ; while you, Athenians, who day by day, 
in every word you hear and every sight you see, 
contemplate the memorials of the prowess of your 
forefathers, might be so intrinsically base as unin- 
vited and unforced to surrender to Philip the liberty 
of Greece?" 

^^ Great empires and little minds," said Burke, "go 
ill together." Athens fell because she had become an 
Athens of little minds. Demosthenes is a tragical 
figure because he is a man of the antique mold surviv- 
ing in a time not moved by the antique motives, speak- 
ing to little minds the things which only stir great ones. 
When Guizot asked Lowell how long the American 
Republic would endure, Lowell answered rightly : "So 
long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue 
dominant." Demosthenes knew well that Athens could 
stand only as she was true to the principles of the fathers, 
not because they were the principles of the fathers, but 
because the fathers had been faithful to true principles. 
Athens was false to these, and Athens fell ; but the 



12 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

message of Demosthenes to Athens remains a message 
to every republic, in every time. He spoke to an 
apathetic Athens, he spoke to an Athens losing its con- 
science and its will, no longer capable of sustained 
effort. The people in their assemblies applauded fine 
sentiments, liked to hear laudations of their fathers, 
passed eloquent resolutions, — and shirked their duties. 
They reflected after the event. They depended upon 
leaders and left all business and the disposal of emolu- 
ments to these, instead of depending upon themselves 
and fighting their own battles as formerly. ' ' In old 
days," Demosthenes said, ''the people was master of 
its statesmen; now it is their servant." The change 
had brought corruption and venality in high places and 
in low. ''Something there once was in the heart of 
the masses which there is not now, something which 
prevailed over the wealth of Persia, which kept Greece 
in freedom, which was unvanquished in battle by land 
or sea." This secret force was a hatred of bribery. 
' ' New principles are now imported, wherewith Greece 
is sick even to death. And what are these ? Envy if 
a man has taken a bribe ; ridicule if he confesses it ; 
pardon if the guilt is proved ; hatred of those who cen- 
sure him." He spoke to a materialistic, money-loving, 
game-loving, luxury-loving, flattery-loving Athens, and 
an Athens seeking for fine interpretations of poor con- 
duct. But he was fearless and sincere, refusing to 
ignore or whitewash facts, and speaking truth at every 
cost. Nowhere else are the shortcomings of a people 
more severely dealt with ; but his severity is never the 
severity of the scold, but the severity of faith, which 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 13 

ennobles and stimulates. His politics is a politics which 
he can take to the altar. ' ' Ye gods, inspire these men 
with a better mind and heart ! Ye gods, grant us a 
sure salvation ! " Every question of public policy de- 
pends with him on some principle which has its root in 
morals ; and therefore with him no noble policy could 
be failure and no ignoble poHcy success. Surveying 
the last struggle with Philip and its results, he ex- 
claimed : "I say that if the event had been manifest to 
the whole world beforehand, if you who never opened 
your lips had been ever so loud or shrill in prophecy 
and protest, not even then ought Athens to have for- 
saken this course, if Athens had any regard for her 
glory, or for her past, or for the ages to come." 

The purest and intensest of patriots, Demosthenes 
was also one of the broadest ; and here too he has a 
lesson for us. His devotion to Athens did not hinder 
his devotion to G-reece. He rose above every narrow 
and provincial prejudice and took all Hellas into his 
heart. Washington, after the Ee volution, when few 
men in the Colonies could see beyond the borders of 
their own Massachusetts or New York or Virginia, de- 
clared that henceforth the politics of America must be 
measured on '' a continental scale. " What vision that 
witnessed to, and how much it meant, it is hard for us 
to-day to understand ; but it meant much more for 
Demosthenes to see and say to the Athenians that 
politics must be measured on an Hellenic scale. To 
the Greek his town or city was his country ; and the 
insularity of Athens, Thebes, or Sparta was vastly 
greater than the mutual repulsion of the States under 



14 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

the old Articles of Confederation, or than South 
Carolina's emphasis upon State rights in 1830 or 1861. 
For Demosthenes to transcend Athens meant almost 
as much as for us to recognize, as now becomes our 
duty, that the time has come when no man may longer 
so construe his patriotism as to say in the first place, 
I am an American, an Englishman, a Frenchman, a 
German, a Kussian, but when all must know them- 
selves in the first place as citizens of the world and 
define every narrower patriotism in subordination to 
that higher definition. Demosthenes was accused by 
^schines of Boeotian sympathies, because he was able 
to do justice to men beyond his own borders, for whom 
his narrowly and vulgarly patriotic neighbors had only 
jealousy and hate. ^'I know," he says in one place, 
' ^ that it is difficult to say anything to you about the 
Theban people ; you hate them so that you would not 
like to hear anything to their credit, even if it were 
true." More and more Demosthenes speaks as the 
Hellenic patriot rather than as the Athenian citizen. 
His vision becomes ever broader as his feeling becomes 
ever more intense and as the danger of Grreece becomes 
greater. The duty of Athens becomes, as he conceives 
it, to deliver the oppressed and to support every- 
where the claims of democracy against oligarchy and 
despotism. 

The old Athenian life and our American life have 
much in common. The resemblances between Greek 
character and ours are marked. Those little Greek 
democracies were more like our great one than almost 
any intervening states. They offer us more pertinent 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 15 

examples and warnings than almost any other ; and 
they are of peculiar value for us in this, that their 
history is rounded and complete, and in it we can see 
the various conflicting principles and tendencies work- 
ing themselves out to the end, and so learn the full 
lesson of their logic. Pericles and Demosthenes speak 
to America as well as to Athens ; and we may well 
domesticate their admonitions here to-day and empha- 
size them to our people and ourselves as the words of 
fellow citizens of Washington and Jefferson, of Sum- 
ner and Emerson. If the life and burning eloquence 
of Demosthenes teach anything, if the rounded 
period of history whose darkness he lights up teaches 
anything, they teach the validity and the imperious 
moment of the appeal, in times of danger and tempta- 
tion, to the fathers and to a great past, to the history 
and the teachings which in times of soberness have 
ever had the nation's highest honor. No nation which 
is virtuous and vital will ever be slave to the past ; at 
the command of virtue and of vision it will snap pre- 
cedent like a reed. But every people of seriousness, 
stability and character is a reverent people ; and when 
a people's reverence for its noble ancestors, its sacred 
oracles and its venerable charters ceases to be sturdy 
and becomes sentimental, much more when it ceases 
to exist at all, then the hour of that people's decay 
and doom has struck. On this anniversary of our 
Declaration of Independence, let us remember and vow 
never to forget that when it becomes general or pop- 
ular among us, as it has become common, to flout at 
the Declaration and its principles ; whenever the 



16 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

nation commits itself to courses which, for the sake 
of consistency and respectability, invite and compel 
its disparagement ; when our politics does not match 
our poetry and cannot be sung ; when Washington 
and Jefferson and Sumner and Lincoln cease to be 
quoted in our cabinet and at our helm, — then it is 
not well with us, but ill, and it is time to study the 
compass. 

Our City of Boston is in this matter under the special 
care of the divinities ; they have made regular provision 
to remind us of our pious founders and fathers every 
day. The State of Massachusetts unhappily has for its 
State seal one of the most barbarous and least repre- 
sentative seals adopted by any State in the Union: an 
Indian with bow and arrow, and a clenched fist with a 
sword, — formerly the emblem of Algiers, — with some 
Latin of questionable character about keeping the peace 
under the sword. It will be remembered by some 
here how deeply Charles Sumner hated this ' ' bellicose 
escutcheon," as he termed it, and how in his great 
Fourth of July oration in 1845 he expressed the hope 
that Massachusetts might abandon it for the sake of 
something ^'more consistent with her moral dignity 
and the character she vaunts before the world." To 
keep the peace is certainly a commendable and neces- 
sary thing ; but — since some will have it that the 
clenched fist is the policeman's, not the soldier's — is 
it a thing to boast of ? As soon be proud, in civiliza- 
tion, that your hands are clean. Let Massachusetts 
not be satisfied to front the world with the badge 
either of the policeman or the warrior ; let her take 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 17 

the mantle of the prophet, to which no other modern 
state has right so vahd and divine. Let us pledge 
ourselves here to the effort to secure for the Common- 
wealth a seal more worthy of her. And meantime let 
us be grateful that the motto upon the seal of the City 
of Boston is the noblest possible. For each time that 
an ordinance or proclamation is sealed by the govern- 
ment of Boston, — let our City Hall never forget it, 
and let us not forget, — it is with the reverent tribute 
and the prayer: ^'God be with us as He was with our 
fathers ! " 

And, indeed, if any people ever had warrant and occa- 
sion to look back to their fathers and their history for 
inspiration and imperative, such surely — Athens and 
Rome not more — have the people of this City of Boston 
and this ancient Commonwealth. The founders of 
Massachusetts, our own Lowell has justly said, were 
the first colonists in human history who went out ' ^ not 
to seek gold, but to seek God." ''Next to the fugitives 
whom Moses led out of Egypt," he said, ''the little 
shipload of outcasts who landed at Plymouth two cen- 
turies and a half ago are destined to influence the future 
of the world." We thrill with warm and proper pride 
as we read this high claim of our Massachusetts essayist 
and poet. With a just pride we also read the strong 
words of the president of our Historical Society, Charles 
Francis Adams, in his book on our Massachusetts his- 
torians, — a book not written, as scholars here know 
well, to puff our Massachusetts pride, but rather to 
prick some of our Massachusetts bubbles : ' ' The his- 
tory of Massachusetts is the record of the gradual and 



18 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

practical development of a social and political truth of 
the highest importance. Viewed in this light, the 
passage of the Red Sea was not a more momentous 
event than the voyage of the Mayflower; and the 
founding of Boston was fraught with consequences 
hardly less important than those which resulted from 
the founding of Eome." 

What is the great political truth for which Boston 
and Massachusetts stand thus preeminently in history, 
and which confers immortal lustre on them ? It is the 
truth for which the Declaration of Independence stands, 
which we celebrate to-day, the principle of the equality 
of men before the law. This was no deliverance of the 
French Revolution; it has been well said that, if there 
was any learning between Jefferson and the French 
political philosophers, they were the learners, not he. 
It was the offspring of the Puritan movement, which at 
the same time established the English Commonwealth 
and planted New England. Mr. Adams knows this 
well; it was to asking New England to remember it that 
the eloquent English preacher who is now visiting us 
devoted his first word last week in Boston ; it was to 
make it plain and draw its lessons that the keen and wise 
Swiss scholar, Borgeaud, in Calvin's city, wrote his pen- 
etrating book upon ' ' The Rise of Modern Democracy in 
Old and New England." It was in New England that 
the principle was really first embodied in institutions; 
here Sir Harry Vane was steeped in it; and when pres- 
ently the Puritans in England drew up their '^Agree- 
ment of the People " and sought to institute the prin- 
ciple, they spoke of it as ''the New England Way." 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 19 

The principle has had a hard fight of it in England. For 
a century before the Declaration of Independence it had 
a hard fight of it here; but Mr. Adams is right in say- 
ing that when the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 
went into effect, this principle of human equality before 
the law, theoretically enunciated in the Declaration, was 
a thing in practice in New England. He is right in 
saying that in respect to this the record of no commu- 
nity is more creditable, more consistent, or more impor- 
tant than ours. ^ ' Massachusetts has always been at the 
front. . . . Her influence has been world-wide. The 
backbone of the movement which preceded the French 
Eevolution, she inspired the agitation which ended in 
the fall of African slavery." 

It is right to say, and let us remember it on this 
sacred anniversary as an inspiration to duty, that 
Boston has been the centre of the two great move- 
ments in our history, the movement which gave us 
independence and the movement which purged the 
land of slavery. If we could rear on Boston Common 
a monument upon which, around the central form of 
Samuel Adams, should be grouped the figures of James 
Otis and John Adams and John Hancock and Joseph 
Warren and their great associates, how much that 
monument would represent of what was most dynamic 
in the days which led up to the American Revolution ! 
If we could rear beside it a monument upon which, 
around the central figure of William Lloyd Garrison, 
should stand Wendell Phillips, Parker and Channing, 
Lowell and Emerson, Sumner and Andrew, how much 
would be represented by that group of what was most 



20 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

potent in the anti-slavery struggle ! When the final 
history is written of the great social and industrial rev- 
olution into which we have already far advanced, and 
which will continue until there exists throughout the 
republic an industrial equality as great as the political 
equality which we now enjoy or claim to enjoy, it will 
be seen that here, too, Boston has done her conspicuous 
part. And when we survey the movement in behalf 
of the overthrow of war, in behalf of the peace of 
nations and the organization of the world, the preemi- 
nent task of our own time, we shall find that in this 
great movement Boston has led America ; I think it is 
not too much to claim that she has led the world. As 
it was the glory of Boston and of Massachusetts, proud- 
est of cities and of commonwealths, strongest in local 
patriotism, to lead the country in the assertion of 
national sovereignty against every false emphasis upon 
state's rights, in that long struggle which nearly cost 
the nation its life and which made it forever impossi- 
ble for the American to say henceforth. My state is 
first, — so it has been their glory to lead in the creation 
of the sentiment which meets the peculiar problem and 
menace of our own age, enabling and inspiring men to 
harmonize their politics and their religion, and know 
that their first allegiance is not to their nation, but to 
humanity. 

In this our Commonwealth and city have but been 
true to the sublime pointings and ideals of the leaders 
of the Kevolution and the founders of the Republic, 
whom we celebrate to-day. Independence for the sake 
of independence, a new nation for the sake of a new 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 21 

nation, — that was not the aim and motive of our 
fathers. Their dream was of a new nation of juster 
institutions and more equal laws, a nation in which 
should dwell righteousness, and which should mark 
the beginning of a new era among men. It should be 
especially an era of peace and brotherhood among the 
nations. They hated war. They believed that the 
time had come when the bloody dispensation of war, 
with all its terrible wickedness and waste, should 
cease ; and their ambition and high hope was that 
their new republic might lead in the new dispensation 
of peace and order and mutual regard. To this abhor- 
rence of war as a cardinal and controlling sentiment with 
the men who achieved our independence I ask your 
attention ; and no eloquence can be so powerful and 
persuasive as the simple presentation of their words. 

We call Samuel Adams the * ^ Father of the American 
Revolution." He first clearly foresaw it, and he did 
most in the days before 17Y5 to determine its character 
and direct its course. Of all the statesmen of the 
Revolution he was the one whose viev/s were closest to 
those of the great author of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. When in 1801 Jefferson prepared his in- 
augural address as president, he wrote to our vener- 
able Boston patriot: ^'In meditating the matter of 
that address, I often asked myself. Is this exactly in 
the spirit of the patriarch of liberty, Samuel Adams ? 
Is it as he would express it ? Will he approve of it ? 
I have felt a great deal for our country in the times 
we have seen, but individually for no one so much as 
yourself." Among the manuscripts of Samuel Adams 



22 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

there exists one of the most remarkable and prophetic 
documents of that prophetic time. Whether it ever 
became a legislative act we do not know ; but it is in 
the form of a letter of instructions from the Legisla- 
ture of Massachusetts to the delegates in Congress, and 
it apparently belongs to the period between the close of 
the Eevolution and the adoption of the Constitution. 
The General Court in this letter declares the instruction 
to be one ''which they have long had in contemplation, 
and which, if their most ardent wish could be obtained, 
might in its consequences extensively promote the 
happiness of man." The instruction is as follows : 

' ' You are hereby instructed and urged to move the 
United States in Congress assembled to take into their 
deep and most serious consideration, whether any 
measures can by them be used, through their influence 
with such of the nations in Europe as they are united 
with by treaties of amity or commerce, that national 
differences may be settled and determined without the 
necessity of war, in which the world has too long been 
deluged, to the destruction of human happiness and the 
disgrace of human reason and government. " 

If it was found that no definite action could then be 
taken, it was urged that it would redound to the honor 
of the United States, that its Congress attended to this 
subject, and that it would be accepted as a testimony 
of gratitude to Grod for his signal blessings upon the 
States ; and the delegates were instructed to have the 
letter entered in the Journals of Congress, to remain 
for the inspection of delegates from Massachusetts in 
future time. 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 23 

This proposition from the Father of the American 
Revolution — whose severe general exposures of the 
banefulness and inconsistency of militarism in democ- 
racy are so well known — for some regular and perma- 
nent arrangement for international arbitration among 
the nations of Christendom, to make an end of war, 
was penned more than a century before the similar 
proposition of the Czar of Russia resulted in the Con- 
ference at The Hague and the establishment of the Per- 
manent International Tribunal, whose creation is the 
distinctive historical event and the crowning glory of 
the present age. 

Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, — these are the 
three names of world-wide fame in connection with 
the achievement of our independence and the birth of the 
nation. What was their attitude toward war and the 
military system ? What was their ideal and desire for 
the United States ? By fortunate fatality, the history 
of Jefferson's administration has been written by a de- 
scendant of John Adams, the great defender of the 
Declaration of Independence on the floor of Congress, 
a brother of the president of our Historical Society, 
who defined in words so noble the foundation and 
vocation of Massachusetts and of Boston ; and nowhere 
else have the political purposes and aspirations of the 
great author of the Declaration been so well stated 
briefly as by Henry Adams in this history ; 

Jefferson aspired beyond the ambition of a nationality, and em- 
braced in his view the whole future of man. That the United 
States should become a nation like France, England or Russia, or 
should conquer the world like Eome, was no part of his scheme. 



24 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

He wished to begin a new era. Hoping for a time when the world's 
ruling interests should cease to be local and should become uni- 
versal ; when questions of boundary and nationality should become 
insignificant ; when armies and navies should be reduced to the 
work of police, — he set himself to the task of governing with this 
golden age in view. Few men have dared to legislate as though 
eternal peace were at hand, in a world torn by wars and convulsions 
and drowned in blood ; but this was what Jefferson aspired to do. 
Even in such dangers, he believed that Americans might safely set 
an example which the Christian world should be led by interest to 
respect and at length to imitate. As he conceived a true American 
policy, war was a blunder, an unnecessary risk ; and even in case 
of robbery and aggression, the United States, he believed, had only 
to stand on the defensive in order to obtain justice in the end. He 
would not consent to build up a new nationality merely to create 
more navies and armies, to perpetuate the crimes and follies of 
Europe ; the central government at Washington should not be per- 
mitted to indulge in the miserable ambitions that had made the Old 
World a hell and frustrated the hopes of humanity. 

To Thomas Pinckney, in 1797, Jefferson wrote a 
word which suggests an utterance of John Bright's 
fourscore years afterwards giving the truth a broader 
apphcation to the United States and her opportunity 
as the great peace power of the world. Wrote Jeffer- 
son to Pinckney : ' ' War is not the best engine for us 
to resort to. Nature has given us one in our commerce, 
which, if properly managed, will be a better instrument 
for obliging the interested nations of Europe to treat 
us with justice." John Bright, in the House of Com- 
mons, in 1879, speaking by interesting coincidence on 
the Fourth of July, set forth to England and the 
nations of Europe the folly of their burdensome arma- 
ments and exhausting taxation, and the terrible dis- 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 25 

advantage under which they labored in competition 
with the United States, unhampered as she was by 
such taxation, by costly armies and navies, and a 
^ ' spirited foreign policy. " Her resources were all free 
for constructive purposes. If the United States per- 
sisted in her political wisdom and commercial common 
sense for a quarter of a century, the nations of Europe 
would be compelled, he believed, to throw over their 
costly military system in mere commercial self -protec- 
tion. Incredible to the great English statesman and 
lover of America would have been the intimation that 
before the quarter of a century rolled by we should 
see the growth among us of a movement recklessly 
seeking to throw away this very commercial advan- 
tage and our chief lever for pressing forward the 
disarmament and peace of the nations ; incredible that 
we, too, should be wasting hundreds of millions on 
needless and wicked wars, we, too, shouting for a ' ' big 
navy" and organizing "naval leagues," descending to 
meet the nations of Europe on their own terms and 
plane instead of forcing them up to ours, tempted to 
put on their hoary old plumes and arms and false 
prides and ambitions just when the best minds among 
themselves are striving so earnestly to make them put 
them off. 

One year after his letter to Thomas Pinckney, Jeffer- 
son, in a letter to Sir John Sinclair, gave memorable 
expression to his abhorrence of the war system. ^ ^ I 
recoil with horror," he said, "at the ferociousness of 
man. Will nations never devise a more rational um- 
pire of differences than force ? Are there no means of 



26 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

coercing injustice more gratifying to our nature than a 
waste of the blood of thousands and of the labor of 
millions of our fellow creatures ? Wonderful has been 
the progress of human improvement in other lines. 
Let us hope, then, that the law of nature, which makes 
a virtuous conduct produce benefit and vice loss to the 
agent in the long run, which has sanctioned the com- 
mon principle that honesty is the best policy, will in 
time influence the proceedings of nations as well as 
individuals, and that we shall at length be sensible that 
war is an instrument entirely inefficient towards redress- 
ing wrong ; that it multiplies instead of indemnifying 
losses.''^ And in this striking passage he proceeds to 
urge the economic argument against war: ^^Had the 
money which has been spent in the present war in 
Europe been employed in making roads and conducting 
canals of navigation and irrigation through the coun- 
try, not a hovel in the Highlands of Scotland or moun- 
tains of Auvergne would have been without a boat at 
its door, a rill of water in every field, and a road to its 
market town. ... A war would cost us more than 
would cut through the isthmus of Darien; and that of 
Suez might have been opened with what a single year 
has seen thrown away on the rock of Gibraltar." The 
word comes with new and added force just as we are 
preparing to cut through that isthmus of Darien by the 
taxation of the people, after wasting three times its 
cost in damaging and demoralizing war. 

Jefferson became an honorary member of the Massa- 
chusetts Peace Society almost immediately upon its 
founding, and his letters to Noah Worcester, the founder 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 27 

of the society, — especially his treatment of wars as the 
duels of nations and his prophecy that they would run 
the same course and come to the same end as duelling 
among gentlemen, — are among the most significant 
papers in the first volume of the Peace Society's journal, 
*'The greatest of human evils," — that was Jefferson's 
verdict upon war. 

It was to Jefferson that the new Eepublican party 
appealed and dedicated itself in its Philadelphia plat- 
form of 1856 ; it declared its purpose to restore the 
action of the Federal government to ' ' the principles of 
Washington and Jefferson." Abraham Lincoln, the 
year before his election as president, wrote to a great 
Eepublican gathering here in Boston to celebrate Jeffer- 
son's birthday : 

The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of 
free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, with no small 
show of success. One dashingly calls them " glittering generalities," 
another bluntly calls them " self-evident lies," and others insidiously 
argue that they apply to " superior races." These expressions, differ- 
ing in form, are identical in object and effect — the supplanting the 
principles of free government, and restoring those of classification, 
caste and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned 
heads plotting against the people. They are the vanguard, the 
miners and sappers of returning despotism. We must repulse them, 
or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensation ; and 
he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those 
who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and under 
a just God cannot long retain it. All honor to Jefferson — to the 
man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national inde- 
pendence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity 
to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth 
applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that 



28 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

to-day and in all coming days it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling- 
block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression. 

Could the words of Lincoln reach to-day the political 
party which, ceasing to quote his words, ventures still 
to name his name, could they reach the republic which 
Jefferson dedicated, and which he at Gettysburg re- 
dedicated in Jefferson's words, what other words than 
Jefferson's would he choose to bring home to us the 
enormity of the subjugation by the republic of a pro- 
testing, struggling people, and the enormity of all 
unjust and unnecessary war ? 

To the common sense of Franklin we should natur- 
ally expect that the military system would seem folly ; 
and as matter of fact we find that his condemnations 
of the wickedness and waste of war are even more 
numerous and more energetic than Jefferson's. Some 
of them are well known ; but it will be useful to bring 
this strong body of testimony together. First, Frank- 
lin's letter to Dr. Richard Price, in 1780. This was in 
the very midst of the war, and Dr. Price was a London 
clergyman, a subject of King George ; but Franklin 
and he remained warm friends throughout, and this 
letter is one of many which Franklin sends from Paris : 

We make daily great improvements in natural, there is one I 
wish to see in moral philosophy : the discovery of a plan that would 
induce and oblige nations to settle their disputes without first 
cutting one another's throats. When will human reason be suffi- 
ciently improved to see the advantage of this ? When will men be 
convinced that even successful wars at length become misfortunes 
to those who unjustly commenced them, and who triumphed blindly 
in their success, not seeing all its consequences ? 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 29 

In 1782, in a letter from Franklin to Dr. Priestley 
upon man's common inhumanity to man, occurs the 
following famous passage : 

In what light we are viewed by superior beings may be gathered 
from a piece of late West India news, which possibly has not 
reached you. A young angel of distinction, being sent down to 
this world on some important business, for the first time, had an old 
courier spirit assigned him for his guide ; they arrived over the seas 
of Martinico, in the middle of the long day of obstinate fight be- 
tween the fleets of Kodney and De Grasse. When through the 
clouds of smoke he saw the fire of the guns, the decks covered with 
mangled limbs, and bodies dead or dying ; the ships sinking, burn- 
ing, or blown into the air ; and the quantity of pain, misery and 
destruction the crews yet alive were thus with so much eagerness 
dealing round to one another ; he turned angrily to his guide and 
said : " You blundering blockhead ! you undertook to conduct me 
to the earth, and you have brought me into hell ! " " No, sir," says 
the guide, " I have made no mistake ; this is really the earth, and 
these are men. Devils never treat one another in this cruel manner ; 
they have more sense, and more of what men vainly call humanity." 

The next year, 1Y83, the treaty of peace was signed 
which recognized the independence of the United States ; 
and Franklin writes as follows to Sir Joseph Banks : 

I join with you most cordially in rejoicing at the return of 
peace. I hope it will be lasting, and that mankind will at length, as 
they call themselves reasonable creatures, have reason enough to 
settle their differences without cutting throats ; for, in my opinion, 
there never was a good war or a had peace. What vast additions to 
the conveniences and comforts of life might mankind have acquired, 
if the money spent in wars had been employed in works of public 
utility ! What an extension of agriculture, even to the tops of the 
mountains ; what rivers rendered navigable, or joined by canals ; 



30 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

what bridges, aqueducts, new roads, and other public works, edifices 
and improvements, rendering England a complete paradise, might 
not have been obtained by spending those millions in doing good, 
which in the last war have been spent in doing mischief — in bring- 
ing misery into thousands of families, and destroying the lives of so 
many working people, who might have performed the useful labors. 

In the same year he writes in the same strain from 
Paris to David Hartley in London : 

I think with you that your Quaker article is a good one, and that 
men will in time have sense enough to adopt it. . . . What would 
you think of a proposition, if I should make it, of a compact between 
England, France and America? America would be as happy as the 
Sabine girls if she could be the means of uniting in perpetual peace 
her father and her husband. What repeated follies are these re- 
peated wars ! You do not want to conquer and govern one another. 
Why then should you be continually employed in injuring and 
destroying one another ? How many excellent things might have 
been done to promote the internal welfare of each country ; what 
bridges, roads, canals and other public works and institutions, tend- 
ing to the common felicity, might have been made and established 
with the money and men foolishly spent during the last seven cen- 
turies by our mad wars in doing one another mischief ! You are 
near neighbors, and each have very respectable qualities. Learn to 
be quiet and to respect each other's rights. You are all Christians. 
One is The Most Christian King^ and the other Defender of the 
Faith. Manifest the propriety of these titles by your future con- 
duct. "By this," says Christ, " shall all men know that ye are my 
disciples, if ye love one another." " Seek peace and ensue it." 

In 1783, when peace was uppermost in his thoughts, 
he wrote also to Mrs. Mary Hewson : '* All wars are 
follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones. 
When will mankind be convinced, and agree to settle 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 31 

their differences by arbitration? "Were they to do it 
even by the cast of a die, it would be better than by 
fighting and destroying each other." Four years later, 
in 178Y, just after the close of the Constitutional Con- 
vention, he returns to this aspect of the subject in 
the following impressive letter to his sister, Mrs. Jane 
Mecom : 

I agree with you perfectly in your disapprobation of war. 
Abstracted from the inhumanity of it, I think it wrong in point of 
human providence. For whatever advantages one nation would 
obtain from another, whether it be part of their territory, the liberty 
of commerce with them, free passage on their rivers, etc., etc., it 
would be much cheaper to purchase such advantages with ready 
money than to pay the expense of acquiring it by war. An army is 
a devouring monster, and when you have raised it you have, in 
order to subsist it, not only the fair charges of pay, clothing, pro- 
vision, arms and ammunition, with numberless other contingent 
and just charges, to answer and satisfy, but you have all the ad- 
ditional knavish charges of the numerous tribe of contractors to 
defray, with those of every other dealer who furnishes the articles 
wanting for your army, and takes advantage of that want to demand 
exorbitant prices. It seems to me that if statesmen had a little 
more arithmetic, or were more accustomed to calculation, wars 
would be much less frequent. I am confident that Canada might 
have been purchased from France for a tenth part of the money 
England spent in the conquest of it. And if, instead of fighting 
with us for the power of taxing us, she had kept us in a good 
humor by allowing us to dispose of our own money, and now and 
then giving us a little of hers by way of donation to colleges or 
hospitals, or for cutting canals or fortifying ports, she might easily 
have drawn from us much more by our occasional voluntary grants 
and contributions than ever she could by taxes. Sensible people 
will give a bucket or two of water to a dry pump that they may 
afterwards get from it all they have occasion for. Her Ministry 



32 THE PKINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

were deficient in that little point of common sense ; and so they 
spent one hundred millions of her money, and after all lost what 
they contended for. 

To Alexander Small, in England, he wrote in 1T8T : 

You have one of the finest countries in the world, and if you 
can be cured of the folly of making war for trade (in which wars 
more has been always expended than the profits of any trade can 
compensate) you may make it one of the happiest. Make the most 
of your own natural advantages, instead of endeavoring to diminish 
those of other nations, and there is no doubt but that you may yet 
prosper and flourish. Your beginning to consider France no longer as 
a natural enemy is a mark of progress in the good sense of the nation. 

Finally, in 1788, he wrote as follows to M. LeVeillard 
in France: 

When will princes learn arithmetic enough to calculate, if they 
want pieces of one another's territory, how much cheaper it would 
be to buy them than to make war for them, even though they were 
to give a hundred years' purchase ? But if glory cannot be valued, 
and therefore the wars for it cannot be subject to arithmetical cal- 
culation, so as to show their advantage or disadvantage, at least wars 
for trade, which have gain for their object, may be proper subjects 
for such computation; and a trading nation, as well as a single 
trader, ought to calculate the probabilities of profit and loss before 
engaging in any considerable adventure. This, however, nations 
seldom do, and we have had frequent instances of their spending 
more money in wars for acquiring or securing branches of commerce 
than a hundred years' profit or the full enjoyment of them can com- 
pensate. 

With these remarkable letters, showing Franklin, as 
does so much besides, so far in advance of his time, or 
for that matter of ours, should be read his ' ' Observa- 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 33 

tions on War." Remarking upon the fact that Europe 
till lately had been without regular troops, he lays his 
finger on the reason for the portentous growth of 
armaments in our own time and the great difficulty of 
disarmament save in concert : ^ ^ One powerful prince 
keeping an army always on foot makes it necessary for 
his neighbor to do the same to prevent surprise." He 
laments the frightful loss to the world of the labor of 
all men employed in war, and notes that the soldier 
loses habits of industry to such degree that he is rarely 
fit for sober business afterwards. It is for the interest 
of humanity that the occasions of war and the induce- 
ments to it should be diminished; and he urges the 
nations to hasten in better mutual organization. ' ' By 
the original law of nations, war and extirpation were 
the punishment of injury. Humanizing by degrees, it 
admitted slavery instead of death. A farther step was 
the exchange of prisoners instead of slavery; another, 
to respect more the property of private persons under 
conquest and be content with acquired dominion. Why 
should not this law of nations go on improving ? Ages 
have intervened between its several steps; but as knowl- 
edge of late increases rapidly, why should not these 
steps be quickened ? " If it is ever permitted the de- 
parted to come back from the other world to this, then 
surely the spirit of Franklin must have hovered over 
the Peace Conference at The Hague, where the law of 
nations took a step so momentous and sublime; and it 
must have been present in the great church at Delft 
when, on that Fourth of July in 1899, by invitation of 
the commissioners of the United States, the members of 



34 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

the Conference gathered there about the tomb of Gro- 
tius, and the silver wreath was laid upon it in tribute 
to the father of international law, in behalf and by- 
instruction of the government of the great republic 
which Franklin and Adams and Jefferson and Wash- 
ington brought into being with the prayer that it might 
bring a new era to the world, an era of peace on earth 
and good will among men. 

Washington — the father of his country — what of 
him ? From him, too, we have the strong, construc- 
tive word. As in other things, so here, Washington 
unites the common sense of Franklin and the vision of 
Jefferson. ' ' Cultivate peace and harmony with all na- 
tions " was one of the charges of his Farewell Address ; 
and his cautions against those policies and entangle- 
ments which so naturally lead to war are known, or 
ought to be, by every American. His admonition to 
keep ourselves always in a ' ' respectable defensive pos- 
ture," when strained, as it so often is by our militant 
folk, to cover their schemes, is wantonly misused. He 
knew, as well as John Bright knew a century later, how 
happy is our position and how impregnable we are so 
long as we act like Christians ; and the measure of his 
idea of a '^respectable defensive posture " is the fact 
that the total expenditure for national armament under 
his sanction during the entire eight years of his admin- 
istration was less than eight million dollars. In the last 
half dozen years we have spent in direful and needless 
war eight hundred million dollars ; and we are multiply- 
ing battle-ships by the dozen — surely not needed for 
*' respectable defense"- — a single one of which costs 



THE PKINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 35 

almost as much as our whole army and navy appropria- 
tions during Washington's long term as president. In 
the Farewell Address itself he denounced great arma- 
ments, and spoke with deepest feeling of their dangers 
to democracy. ^ ' Overgrown military establishments 
are, under any form of government, inauspicious to lib- 
erty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to 
republican liberty." Washington was no parochial 
statesman. No man in his great day saw so far west 
as he ; to-day his vision would sweep round the world. 
Freeman wrote of him as *^ the expander of England," 
because he first drastically and effectually taught Eng- 
land that her empire could expand and endure only by 
justice. He was much more the great expander of the 
republic ; and he would be the great expander of the 
republic's true influence among men. He would tell 
the republic to-day that it is no longer boy, but man, 
and that it must acquit itself like a man. While he wa"s~ 
yet with us he foresaw the time ^'when, our institu- 
tions being firmly consolidated and working with com- 
plete success, we might safely and perhaps beneficially 
take part in the consultations held by foreign states for 
the advantage of the nations " ; and he would tell us 
that a hundred relations are imperative for us to-day 
which were not expedient for us a hundred years ago. 
But he would also tell us that there are truths which 
do not change with the centuries and with which the 
nation that measures its power on a continental scale 
may no more trifle with impunity than the new man- 
child. There is an indissoluble union, he would still 
repeat to us, between '^an honest and magnanimous 



36 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity "; and 
the smiles of heaven cannot be expected on a nation when 
it ^'disregards the eternal rules of order and right." 

A nation never does this more flagrantly, he held, 
than in unjust and unnecessary war ; and the war 
spirit is the subject of his constant rebuke. One of 
the points which he puts down to urge, among the 
early hints for the Farewell Address, is ' ' That we may 
never unsheath the sword except in self-defence, so 
long as justice and our essential rights and national 
respectability can be preserved without it." To David 
Humphreys, secretary of the commission sent abroad 
to negotiate treaties of commerce, he wrote, in 1785, 
concerning war : ' ' My first wish is to see this 
plague to mankind banished from the earth, and 
the sons and daughters of this world employed in 
more pleasing and innocent amusements than in pre- 
paring implements and exercising them for the de- 
struction of mankind." In the same tone he wrote 
in the same year to the Marquis de la Kouerie, an 
officer just appointed to the command of a French 
army corps : ' ' My first wish is (although it is 
against the profession of arms, and would cUp the 
wings of some of your young soldiers who are soaring 
after glory) to see the whole world in peace, and the 
inhabitants of it as one band of brothers striving who 
should contribute most to the happiness of mankind." 
To Kochambeau, in 1786, he expressed his abhorrence 
of the ''rage of conquest" among the nations of 
Europe, and of the ' ' effusion of human blood for the 
acquisition of a little territory." To the Marquis de 



THE PKINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 37 

Chastellux, in 1788, he wrote, while the ''great person- 
ages" of the north of Euroj)e were ''making war 
under the infatuation of Mars": "It is time for the 
age of knight-errantry and mad heroism to be at an 
end. Your young military men, who want to reap the 
harvest of laurels, do not care, I suppose, how many 
seeds of war are sown ; but for the sake of humanity 
it is devoutly to be wished that the manly employment 
of agriculture and the humanizing benefits of com- 
merce would supersede the waste of war and the rage 
of conquest ; that the swords might be turned into 
ploughshares, the spears into pruning-hooks, and, as 
the Scriptures express it, 'the nations learn war no 
more.' " In the same year he writes to Lafayette : 
"Would to God the harmony of nations were an ob- 
ject that lay nearest to the hearts of sovereigns, and 
that the incentives to peace, of which commerce and 
facility of understanding each other are not the most 
inconsiderable, might be daily increased ! " And again : 
' ' There seems to be a great deal of bloody work cut 
out for this summer in the north of Europe. If war, 
want, and plague are to desolate those huge armies 
that are assembled, who, that has the feelings of a 
man, can refrain from shedding a tear over the miser- 
able victims of regal ambition? It is really a strange 
thing that there should not be room enough in the 
world for men to live without cutting one another's 
throats." At the same time he wrote to Jefferson : 
"In whatever manner the nations of Europe shall 
endeavor to keep up their prowess in war and their 
balance of power in peace, it will be obviously our 



38 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

policy to cultivate tranquillity at home and abroad, and 
to extend our agriculture and commerce as far as 
possible." To Rochambeau he wrote the next year, 
1789 : ^'Notwithstanding it might probably, in a com- 
mercial view, be greatly for the advantage of America 
that a war should rage on the other side of the Atlantic, 
yet I shall never so far divest myself of the feelings 
of a man interested in the happiness of his fellowmen 
as to wish my country's prosperity might be built on 
the ruins of that of other nations." To the merchants 
of Philadelphia he said in 1793 : ''The friends of hu- 
manity will deprecate war, wheresoever it may appear ; 
and we have experienced enough of its evils in this 
country to know that it should not be wantonly or 
unnecessarily entered upon." In his speech to Con- 
gress, just before this, in 1792, he spoke the following 
serious word, which it becomes his countrymen never 
to forget: "It would be wise, by timely provisions, 
to guard against those acts of our own citizens which 
might tend to disturb peace with other nations, and to 
put ourselves in a condition to give that satisfaction 
to foreign nations which we may sometimes have oc- 
casion to require of them. I particularly recommend 
to your consideration the means of preventing those 
aggressions by our citizens on the territory of other 
nations, and other infractions of the law of nations, 
which, furnishing just subject of complaint, might 
endanger our peace with them." 

Such were the sentiments of the leaders of the 
American Revolution and the founders of the republic 
concerning war ; such their solemn warnings to us 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 39 

against its wickedness and waste, against great armies 
and navies, against the indulgence of the mihtary 
spirit so hostile to democracy, against the rage of con- 
quest and the lust for territorial aggrandizement, — 
that ^'original sin of nations," as Gladstone so well 
called it, — and against injustice to any people; and 
such their lofty summons to the nation at its birth to 
make itself the great peace power of the world and 
hasten the day when the arbitrament of reason should 
supplant everywhere the arbitrament of arms. And 
this high behest and vision of the fathers — this is our 
proud claim — have nowhere else met with such warm 
or general acceptance or been honored and reinforced 
by such earnest practical activity as here. The City of 
Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, — more 
than any others have these done to make prevalent in 
public opinion the gospel of peace preached by Wash- 
ington and Franklin and Jefferson, and to embody their 
noble and inspiring program in institutions and in law. 
Here — this is our birthright and our boast, badge of 
our honor and measure of our obligation — has been 
the centre in America of the movement for interna- 
tional justice and the peace and order of the world. 

Boston and Massachusetts have helped preserve the 
nation in the way of honorable peace by denouncing in 
the first place the unjust and unnecessary wars by 
which the nation has been threatened or into which it 
has been betrayed ; and this, by the mouth of their 
best men, they have done faithfully and fearlessly 
through whatever clamor and passion on the part of 
the multitude or the fashionable mob. They had. 



40 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

indeed, high warrant for it. They never forgot 
their own beginnings ; never forgot that the most 
faithful and most influential friends, the strongest 
reinforcement, which the Boston town meetings, the 
Continental Congress and the embattled farmers had in 
1775 were the manly and liberty -loving Englishmen in 
Parliament who, scorning the base doctrine that an 
administration is not to be criticized in time of war, 
defied ministers to their faces and denounced the war 
upon the colonies from first to last as false to every 
cherished principle of English politics and law, to the 
common instincts of justice and the fundamental rights 
of men. Let America never forget this, never forget 
the two Englands, the England of Burke and Chatham 
as well as the England of Lord North and George the 
Third, the great England of workingmen, the men of 
Lancashire, as well as the little England that fitted 
out the Alabama, the England of John Morley and 
James Bryce as well as of Joseph Chamberlain. Al- 
most every Englishman who is still remembered with 
honor after the century was on our side in 1775 ; as 
almost every Englishman of world-wide eminence in 
thought denounced and resisted the ruthlessness and 
passion which blotted out last year the little South 
African republics. I confess that I long ago came to 
question the wisdom of our going on reading publicly 
year after year on the Fourth of July the long list of 
English tyrannies and usurpations which makes up 
the greater part of the Declaration of Independence ; 
although that stinging list has unhappy pertinence for 
us to-day as the perennial program of oppression. The 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 41 

great general principles, the "blazing ubiquities," we 
will repeat forever ; let them be written in letters of 
gold upon our capitol and graved upon our hearts. 
But may we not properly and profitably give poor 
old George the Third a rest, and concentrate our 
attention more on contemporary lunatics and sinners ? 
The divinities doubtless have their own good reasons 
for the long time they take in burying the remem- 
brance of such deeds ; and so long as a distorted Anglo- 
mania lives among us, or men forget that this republic 
is not simply New England, but also New Germany, 
New France, New Ireland, New Italy, and New Jerusa- 
lem ; so long as there is an England which can perpe- 
trate and celebrate a Boer war ; so long, perhaps, the 
divinities will ordain — "lest we forget" — that America 
shall go on rehearsing the story of the Stamp Act, the 
Tea Party, the Boston Massacre, and Bunker Hill, and 
our school-boys shall recite the melancholy catalogue 
in the Declaration, which I, for one, have long ceased 
to like to hear. I prefer to remember that the best 
men in England saw and said, in the very midst of the 
conflict, that the men behind the redoubt on Bunker 
Hill, and not King George's soldiers, were the true rep- 
resentatives of the English idea, — Samuel Adams when 
the British government put a price upon his head, and 
George Washington bombarding the British army out 
of Boston. I prefer to remember that by every text- 
book of history in the English schools — I have read the 
pages in thirty of them — the English boy and girl are 
taught that we were right and the English government 
fatally wrong in 1775, taught to see heroes in Wash- 



42 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

ington and Franklin ; while how often the little Yankee 
is hardly out of petticoats before he is setting up sticks 
in the back-yard and shooting his peas at them as ' ^ red- 
coats ! " I prefer to remember the gratitude declared 
again and again by the very map of Massachusetts to 
our brave English champions. 

Pittsfield was so called before 1766 ; but it preserves 
the name and memory of the Great Commoner who 
in that year thundered in Parliament: '^I rejoice 
that America has resisted. Three millions of people 
so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily 
to submit to be slaves would have been fit instru- 
ments to make slaves of the rest. In a good cause 
you can crush America to atoms ; but on this ground, 
a crying injustice, I am one who will lift up my 
hands against it. In such a cause your success would 
be hazardous. America, if she fell, would fall like 
the strong man ; she would embrace the pillars of 
the State and pull down the Constitution with her. 
The Americans have been wronged ; they have been 
driven to madness by injustice. Will you punish them 
for the madness you have occasioned ? " In the same 
spirit, the younger Pitt, while the war was in progress, 
denounced it on the floor of Parliament as ' ' the most 
accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, 
and diabolical war." 

The name of Foxborough is a monument to Charles 
James Fox, of whom Grattan said that when he was 
attacking Lord North's administration during the 
American war he was the best speaker he had ever 
heard. The tea tax, Fox declared, would force the 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 43 

colonies into open rebellion; and when the war was 
imminent he plainly said that ^'if the question lay 
between conquering and abandoning America he was 
for abandoning it. " To Boston he paid special tribute 
for her heroic suffering in the common cause. In 
Fox's speech after Saratoga, Luttrell charged him with 
talking treason, — as Horace Walpole might easily have 
been charged, who exclaimed when the news came 
from Saratoga, ^^ Thank God, old England is safe, — 
that is, America, whither the true English retired 
under Charles the First ! " The war with America 
Fox pronounced *'a war of passion'' ; and after York- 
town, when the government announced that ^ ' ParHa- 
ment had heard with impatience the narratives of the 
disasters," he burst forth hotly : "Ministers must, by 
the aroused indignation and vengeance of an injured 
and undone people, hear of them at the tribunal of 
justice and expiate them on the public scaffold." 

Our town of Conway perpetuates the name of the 
chivalric mover of the repeal of the Stamp Act, of 
whom in the hour of his triumph Burke wrote : ' ^ I 
stood near him, and his face, to use the expression of 
the Scriptures of the first martyr, his face was as it 
were the face of an angel." From that hour to 1780, 
when he so burningly reproached the bishops, then as 
in 1900 almost solid in support of reaction and oppres- 
sion, for backing up the war and bloodshed, Conway 
was always true to justice and to America. 

Our Grafton was named after that Duke of Grafton, 
who in 1775 spoke plainly to the king of his ministers 
as men who, "deluded themselves, are deluding your 



44 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

majesty." When later on the king spoke to him of 
the Hessians he was sending over, he said to him more 
plainly still; *^Your majesty will find too late that 
twice the number will only increase the disgrace and 
never effect the purpose." 

Our Massachusetts Barre, too, — it bears the name of 
Colonel Isaac Barre, whose famous phrase was caught 
up by our ''Sons of Liberty" everywhere in the 
Stamp Act days for their christening. It was Barr6 
who retorted, when Lord North proposed to retain the 
tea tax for the mere sake of humbling America, that 
America thus "humbled" would serve only as ''a 
monument of your arrogance and your folly. For 
my part," he said, ''the America I wish to see is an 
America increasing and prosperous, raising her head 
in graceful dignity, with freedom and firmness assert- 
ing her rights, vindicating her liberties, pleading her 
services and conscious of her merit. If we do not 
change our conduct towards her, America will be 
torn from our side." Barry's bust and his portrait 
find their place in the public buildings of our Massachu- 
setts town. At one of the town celebrations thirty 
years ago, the poet recounts how, at the outbreak of 
the Kevolution : 

When Hutchinson, that hated name, 
Was flung aside in scorn and shame, 
'Twas Barrd's fame the town most prized, 
And Barre 'twas anew baptized. 

And in the following lines he repeats almost literally 
the manly and indignant passage in Barre's speech 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 45 

in Parliament which particularly endeared him to our 
fathers : 

" They, exiles ! planted by your care ? 
'Twas your oppression drove them there. 
Nourished by your indulgence? No ! 
'Twas your neglect that made them grow. 
Protected by your arms? They fought 
In your defence ; unaided wrought 
In those far wilds to build a state 
To make your Empire wide and great. 
But mark I the love of freedom still, 
As ever, rules that people's will ; 
Forbear to try their temper, lest 
They from your grasp that Empire wrest." 
Our fathers heard across the sea 
Those words of fire, that burning plea : 
They felt the flame, then dealt the stroke 
That brake in pieces England's yoke. 
Thereafter, Isaac Barrd's name 
New England's household word became. 

The name which thus became one of our household 
words is repeated in Vermont, in New York, Pennsyl- 
vania, and I know not where besides, — in Pennsylvania 
united with the name of another of our gallant English 
friends in that stormy time, making Wilkesbarre. In- 
deed our own Barre balanced between Barre and Wilkes. 
How many Burkes and Pittsburgs and Chathams and 
Foxboroughs and Camdens and Conways and Graftons 
scattered between the Atlantic and the Pacific repeat 
America's gratitude to that great group of Englishmen! 
There ought to be a town of Burke in every state in the 
Union, to emphasize by its very name to our people and 



46 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

our politicians to all time that great statesman's sturdy- 
common sense and noble philosophy of liberty and law, 
of conciliation and magnanimity. The American colo- 
nists, Burke declared in Parliament, ^'were not only 
devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English 
ideas and on English principles." '^It is not what a 
lawyer tells me I may do," he said to the hair-splitting 
and time-serving politicians, * ^ but what humanity, rea- 
son and justice tell me I ought to do. " 

It is natural that America should honor these men; 
but they are the statesmen of that period whom to-day 
all England honors too. It is common enough for min- 
isters to condemn wars long after the event. Cobden 
and Bright were almost mobbed for opposing the Cri- 
mean war during its progress; but yesterday, with all 
the terrible slaughter and tragedy fifty years behind, 
a Tory premier — following the fashion so common fifty 
years after ruthless wars — talks jocularly after dinner 
about England in the Crimea having ' ' put her money 
on the wrong horse. " Chatham and Burke did not wait 
fifty years . They denounced a sinning government when 
denunciation demanded courage and had point — when 
the government was in its sins ; and they are the monu- 
mental rebuke for all time of the flabby plea, still some- 
times heard even in the America which celebrates them, 
that the patriot in time of war must postpone virtue 
and, if evil be officially decreed, follow the multitude to 
do it. As our republic, year by year, commemorates 
the heroic struggle for her independence, let her always 
remember and rejoice that it was in connection with 
that struggle, didactic in so much, that this great 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 47 

lesson, so fundamental for democracy, was most mem- 
orably taught, with venerable and eternal power. 

How weU Boston and Massachusetts learned the 
lesson they showed in the shameful period of the an- 
nexation of Texas and the Mexican War, one of the 
most iniquitous wars in the history of the republic, 
or of the world. General Grant, who served in the 
war, justly declared it ^^one of the most unjust ever 
waged by a stronger against a weaker people." He 
said plainly and truly that it was ^'a political war " 
and that our troops ^^were sent to provoke a fight." 
Zachary Taylor himself, who, unquestioningly, obedient 
soldier that he was, fought its battles and became its 
hero, viewed it just as Grant viewed it, and Henry 
Clay ; and it was largely because men knew it that he 
was made President of the United States. ^ ' My life, " 
he wrote at the close of the war, ' ^ has been devoted 
to arms, yet I look upon war at all times and under 
all circumstances as a national calamity, to be avoided 
if compatible with the national honor. The principles 
of our government, as well as its true policy, are op- 
posed to the subjugation of other nations and the dis- 
memberment of other countries by conquest." We 
have lived to hear the politics of James K. Polk apolo- 
gized for in Boston, on the ground that Texas and Cali- 
fornia to-day are prosperous states — with the other herit- 
ages of that politics cavalierly brushed aside. But Bos- 
ton and Massachusetts knew in 1845 as well as in 1865 
what the fields are in which a nation pays the penalties 
of its sins ; and here was the centre of the opposition. 
We do not forget the noble utterances of Giddings, 



48 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

of Clay, and even of Calhoun ; but three-quarters of 
the words which ring down through history in con- 
demnation of the Mexican War and the policy which 
provoked it are Massachusetts words. It is in the 
writings of Channing and the speeches of John Quincy 
Adams that the process of the annexation of Texas 
finds its righteous exposure ; and as the iniquitous war 
went on, all that was virtuous and chivalric in this 
city and this Commonwealth was combined to mourn 
the dishonor and impeach the crime. When we have 
named Daniel Webster and Charles Francis Adams, 
Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson, Dana and Hillard, 
Palfrey and Horace Mann, Samuel and Rockwood 
Hoar, Garrison, Phillips and Theodore Parker, Long- 
fellow and Lowell, Whittier and Emerson — who will 
care to confront that roll of honor with the census of 
the Massachusetts morality and intelligence which in 
that time contended that criticism must cease in war 
and that the patriot's doctrine then must be ''My 
country, right or wrong " ? 

It stirs the blood to read the record of the meetings 
here in Faneuil Hall in 1845. We should all, I think, 
have liked to be here at the January meeting, when the 
Texas issue was at its hottest, and have heard the ad- 
dress which Daniel Webster helped prepare : ' ' Massa- 
chusetts denounces the iniquitous project in its incep- 
tion and in every stage of its progress, in its means and 
in its end, and in all the purposes and pretenses of its 
authors." We should like to have been at the November 
meeting, for which Charles Sumner wrote the resolu- 
tions, which, as he wrote at a later day, ' ' start with the 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 49 

enunciation of equal rights and the brotherhood of all 
men as set forth in the Declaration of Independence," 
which he always, from beginning to end, made the 
foundation of his arguments, appeals and aspirations. 
Sumner's speech at that Faneuil Hall meeting was his 
first public utterance after his Fourth of July oration 
on ^'The True Grandeur of Nations"; and he here 
firmly applied the general principles of that oration to 
the concrete case before the country. That was the 
characteristic of the men of Massachusetts in that 
heroic generation. They spoke tart truth and called 
things by their right names. If the administration 
was aiding and abetting a crime against Kansas, ' ' The 
Crime Against Kansas" was what Sumner made a 
speech about. If the criminals, in the midst of their 
shameful politics, prated about '^democracy" and 
^ ' manifest destiny, " Emerson told them with his holy 
scorn that these were ^^fine names for an ugly thing." 
* ^ They call it otto of rose and lavender, — I call it 
bilge water." It was this which made the ^'Biglow 
Papers" not only the masterpiece of American wit 
and humor but one of the immortal masterpieces of 
political morality. Nowhere was the man of pious 
generalities who always fails in the actual exigency 
more sharply satirized tlian by Lowell then and there. 

I'm willin' a man should go tollable strong 

Agin wrong in the abstract, fer thet kind o' wrong 

Is oilers unpop'lar an' never gits pitied, 

Because it's a crime no one never committed ; 

But he mus'n't be hard on partickler sins, 

Coz then he'll be kickin' the people's own shins. 



50 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

In 1847, in the very midst of the Mexican War, a 
committee of the Massachusetts Legislature invited 
Charles Sumner to prepare for it a report on the war. 
This Sumner did, the report embodying a searching 
history of the war and its unrighteous provocation, and 
solemnly condemning it with all the energy of the reso- 
lutions passed in Faneuil Hall. This old report by 
Sumner, long forgotten, was last year rescued from the 
oblivion of the document room and reprinted here in 
Boston ; and I think that no verdict ever penned upon 
the Mexican War, or upon any government which, in 
the words of General Grant, sends soldiers to ^^ provoke 
a fight" for political purposes, will better stand the 
test of the day of judgment. The report passed both 
houses of the Legislature by vote of more than two to 
one, as the declared opinion of the State upon that war. 
This was the answer of the Legislature and the people 
of Massachusetts in 1847, in the very midst of war, to 
the men who say that when a war is once declared the 
patriot shall suspend the exercise of judgment, and all 
do wrong harmoniously together. These Massachusetts 
protesters were in a minority in the country ; the mob 
had the war fever, and poured reproach and ridicule 
upon the State. But the insight and conscience of 
Massachusetts were not concerned with majorities and 
mobs ; they were concerned with truth and right — 
and the years have been their justifiers. 

I think that history will award to our Common- 
wealth and city the same conspicuous praise for their 
position during the period through which we are pass- 
ing. ^'Traitors" have been as thick in Boston in the 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 51 

last half-dozen years as in the British Parhament in 
1775, or in the Massachusetts Legislature in 1847. 
However men may vary as to the wisdom of our stay- 
ing in the Philippines, the policy which our govern- 
ment elected there was certainly a mournful one, as 
false to every wise and worthy principle as our course 
in Mexico, so justly characterized by General Grant, 
and as England's course in 1775, so sternly judged by 
Burke and Chatham. The plainest dictate of poUtical 
morality, as of common providence, if we were sincere 
in our profession of desire to make these people, children 
in politics, self-governing and national, was to foster and 
help, and not destroy, the prestige and power of that 
contingent of them that had attained the national 
spirit and ambition and was able to inspire them, 
able to organize revolution, raise armies, frame gov- 
ernment, and command the popular confidence and 
affection. 

We are now told that a score of the Senators who 
voted for the Philippine treaty have, within a year, 
expressed their sorrow for it ; but there is no virtue in 
sorrow unless it be sorrow for wrong and not simply 
for losses and poor prospects. Franklin wrote to Liv- 
ingston in 1782: ^* Every one of the present British 
ministry has, while in the ministry, declared the 
war against us unjust." Demosthenes prayed to the 
gods for sure salvation and that men might have 
better hearts ; and there is no sure salvation but in 
better hearts. He censured Athens for reflecting after 
the event ; but salutary and saving reflection before 
the event was possible with us only to men thoroughly 



52 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

imbued with the principles of Charles Sumner and 
Samuel Adams and Edmund Burke. Those principles 
would have made impossible in the Philippines a policy 
of conquest and subjugation instead of a policy of fra- 
ternity, conciliation and magnanimity. My claim for 
Boston and for Massachusetts is that this was seen 
most clearly, felt most deeply and declared most 
strongly here, and that history will pronounce our 
city, in 1900 as in 1845, the capital of the opposition to 
* ^ one of the most unjust wars ever waged by a stronger 
against a weaker people. " We would make no boast- 
ful nor pretentious catalogue, nor forget that men 
more conspicuous than any in our borders spoke the 
severe and lofty American word. Benjamin Harrison 
and Grover Cleveland, both of our former presidents, 
spoke it. Sherman and Edmunds and Thomas Reed, 
all in their time the favored candidates of Massachu- 
setts for the presidential place, spoke it. Andrew Car- 
negie and a score of the great captains of finance and 
industry, with Franklin's common sense and Franklin's 
honor, spoke it. Of all Carnegie's splendid generosi- 
ties, no gift, not even that most splendid one of the 
Peace Temple at The Hague, ennobles him so highly 
as his offer to make good to our government, if it 
would release its hold upon the struggling people of 
the Philippines, the twenty milhon dollars it had paid 
to Spain to release hers. Had Carnegie's prayer to 
sign that check been granted, the signature would have 
been one worthy to stand beside that of the great Bos- 
ton merchant, John Hancock, which headed the signa- 
tures to the Declaration of Independence. 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 63 

The organized workingmen of America, from east to 
west, spoke with one voice for generosity and justice. 
We do not forget in Boston the great mass meetings in 
Chicago, greater than any here, nor the Christian chiv- 
ahy in Philadelphia ; we do not forget the great com- 
panies of jurists and divines in every state who, often 
through much obloquy, kept the faith. How ells and 
Mark Twain and John Burroughs in New York and the 
poets and men of letters the country through spoke out 
the old truths as loyally as Higginson and literary Bos- 
ton. '^Cursed is the war no poet sings," is the fine 
authoritative line of one of our Boston poets ; and how- 
ever much subsiding passion still divides us, we shall all 
soon, I think, rejoice together that, although the Revo- 
lution and the Civil War hold so great and sacred place 
in our literature, there is no single reputable song there 
which celebrates the conquest of Mexico or the conquest 
of Luzon. How many a gallant soldier in the field has 
hated the war of conquest and subjugation and felt it 
to be opposed to the principles of the republic as deeply 
as Grant and Zachary Taylor felt it in Mexico, and as 
deeply as the General-in-Chief of our army to-day, who 
has been kept so carefully in quiet during the last five 
years ! It is precisely because General Miles has felt as 
Grant felt in Mexico, and because the country has 
known it, that the popular impulse to do him highest 
honors has been so persistent and irresistible. He, too, 
the great soldier, son of Massachusetts, has kept the 
faith ; and when, the next year or the next, he comes 
back to make our Puritan city his permanent home, we 
shall honor him chiefly for the spirit which made him 



64 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

utter as his last words at the great military banquet 
here last week, '^So long as you remain true to the 
principles of our fathers and of the Declaration of In- 
dependence and to the Constitution, so long will the 
army and navy maintain the honor and character of 
your country." 

The principles of our fathers and of the Declaration 
of Independence have, I say, with due honor to all 
others, been most strenuously insisted on in this sad 
time here in Boston and in Massachusetts. The 
Demosthenes of the hour in the Senate at Wash- 
ington has been George F. Hoar. In the House of 
Representatives there has been no influence more 
potent than that of Samuel W. McCall. The fore- 
most of the protesting scholars and teachers of the 
country has been President Eliot of Harvard Univer- 
sity. And the leader of the popular agitation, not in 
Massachusetts only, but in the country, has been the 
venerable George S. Bout well, who, having served his 
state and nation in every high capacity, never rendered 
them service so high and sacred as in these last years, 
when he has put younger men to shame by his zealous 
and untiring labors to keep the sons true to the great 
principles of the fathers. I think it will not be denied 
that the country at large has recognized Boston as the 
centre of the opposition to this unhappy war. It has 
been made by some a reproach to her, as by others an 
honor. What we ask here is recognition of the fact. 

But when aU this has been said, and when it has 
been granted, I make a larger claim for Boston than 
that of opposition to unworthy wars, in the service 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 65 

of the great program for the peace and organization of 
the world, which inspired Jefferson and Franklin and 
Washington. Hers has not been simply the service 
of criticism, noble and imperative as she has felt the 
critical function to be always in the republic, but 
much more the service of construction and of educa- 
tion. Hers is the glory of having founded the first 
influential Peace Society in the world, ^ and of having 
made herself, from the hour of its founding to the 
present, the most influential seat of education in this 
cause, which men are coming to see to-day to be 
the world's most commanding cause. A month ago 
we dedicated on our Public Garden, on the centennial 
of the beginning of his great ministry in Boston, a 
statue of William Ellery Channing. It was in Chan- 
ning's study, on the day after Christmas, in 1815, that 
the Massachusetts Peace Society was born ; and among 
the many things for which America and the world 
hold Channing in high honor, he has no greater glory 
than that earned by his lifelong service in the cause 
of peace. We remember here to-day that the one 
Fourth of July oration in Boston which is historic and 
ever memorable was that by Charles Sumner, in 1845, 
on ' ' The True Grandeur of Nations " ; and among the 
many things for which the world honors Charles 
Sumner, it honors him for nothing more than that he 
was true throughout his public life to the ' ' declaration 
of war against war," with which he began it, putting 

*The New York Peace Society, the first in the world, was organized in August, 
1815, and the Ohio Peace Society, December 2, 1815 ; but the Massachusetts Society, 
organized December 26, 1815, at once took the lead. The English Society, the first in 
Europe, was formed in London, June 14, 1816. 



56 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

into his speeches in the Senate the gospel which Chan- 
ning preached in the pulpit, the gospel of the Declara- 
tion of Independence and the Sermon on the Mount. 
It was in the Old South Meeting House, on Christmas 
Day, 1820, when he was nine years old, stirred by the 
eloquence of Josiah Quincy, the great mayor, address- 
ing the Peace Society, that the boy Charles Sumner 
received those deep and lasting impressions which, 
confirmed as he closed his college life by the solemn 
words of William Ladd, in the old court-house at 
Cambridge, moved him to consecrate himself to the 
gospel of peace ; and the life of the man, down to the 
last hour, when he bequeathed a fund to Harvard Col- 
lege for an annual prize for the best essay on the meth- 
ods by which war may be permanently superseded, 
showed how well that vow was kept. We rejoice that 
the spires of the Old South Meeting House and Park 
Street Church still stand, pointing to heaven, in our busy 
streets. Among the many things which command our 
reverence for those sacred structures, few are more 
appealing than the fact that within their walls at Christ- 
mas time for many years, first for a long period in the 
one, and then for a long period in the other, were held 
the annual meetings of the Peace Society. It was at 
the first meeting held in Park Street Church, in 18^9, 
four years after his Fourth of July oration on ^^ The True 
Grandeur of Nations," that Sumner gave his still greater 
oration on ^'The War System of Nations," the most 
powerful impeachment of war and the war spirit, I 
confidently declare, ever framed in a single address by 
the hand of man. Channing has paid the fitting tribute 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 57 

to Noah Worcester, the great-minded founder of the 
Massachusetts Peace Society, and I do not need to do it ; 
but we may never forget that his * * Solemn Keview of 
the Custom of War," pubhshed in Boston, in 1814, was 
long the chief document of the Peace cause, and that 
his able and noble organ, "The Friend of Peace," was 
the pioneer Peace journal in the world. Sumner has 
told what he owed and what the world owed to William 
Ladd, the founder of the American Peace Society, in 
which our early one was merged, and which has its 
headquarters here, and I do not need to do it ; but let 
Boston and America forget not that heroic life. I do not 
need to tell, for it has been well done by the eminent 
secretary of the Peace Society, the story of the long 
campaign of education, by book and pamphlet and 
lecture and convention and what is to-day the ablest 
international journal in the world, by which the 
great cause of the world's peace and order has been 
promoted here in Boston. From that Christmas time, 
in 1815, to this Independence Day, in 1903, devotion and 
zeal have never flagged, and our leadership has never 
been lost. Among the twenty-two members of the 
original society, formed in Channing's study, were the 
governor of Massachusetts and the president of Harvard 
College. Within four years the membership rose to a 
thousand; and among those in the ranks from 1815 to 
the present have been the noblest spirits of the city and 
the state. 

Out of its midst came the impulse to the great Inter- 
national Peace Congresses in Europe in the middle of 
the last century. The London Congress of 1843 sprang 



58 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

from its suggestion; and this was the precursor of the 
memorable series a few years afterwards. These Con- 
gresses, the first at Brussels in 1848, the second at Paris, 
under the presidency of Victor Hugo, and with an at- 
tendance of two thousand persons, in 184:9, and others 
at Frankfort and London, registered the high-water 
mark of the Peace movement, a mark which now, 
as the new century opens, it is our duty — let it be 
our high resolve — to leave far behind. Of the twenty 
delegates from the United States at the great Paris 
Congress, thirteen were from Massachusetts ; of the 
half hundred at London, in 1851, one-fourth were from 
Massachusetts. Much more significant, it was from a 
Massachusetts man that the impulse to these historic 
International Congresses came. Elihu Burritt — vener- 
able name — was the original and the chief organizing 
force ; and his word at Brussels, at Paris, at Frank- 
fort, at London, was the strong constructive word. 
'^ A High Court of Nations ! " — that was always his one 
definite demand, in *'the same old speech, " as Dr. Hale 
used to denominate his own speech at Mohonk year 
after year demanding the '^Permanent International 
Tribunal " — Elihu Burritt's own term also — which the 
scoffers told him he would not live to see. The ^ 'Ameri- 
can " proposition — that was what the Congresses called 
Burritt's plea for the Court ; and American, not 
Eussian, it is, — not the conception of the Czar, but of 
Worcester and Channing and Sumner and Burritt, 
one Massachusetts citizen after another speaking it 
out. Son of Connecticut, it was as a citizen of Massa- 
chusetts, his home at the heart of the Commonwealth, 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 59 

that Elihu Burritt did his momentous work — how 
momentous few seem to remember — for the peace and 
better organization of the world. It was in England 
that he organized the '^League of Universal Brother- 
hood "; but it was in Boston, years before, that he gave 
his prophetic address on ' ^ Universal Peace " ; in our 
state that he issued year after year his ^ ^ Christian Citi- 
zen," his ^' Peace Papers to the People," and his '^ Olive 
Leaves." The effort — the successful effort — to secure 
cheap ocean postage, whose results in bringing people 
close together and helping scatter the fogs of ignorance, 
in which fears and jealousies and strifes are born, are 
incalculable, was the effort of Elihu Burritt. Each 
bursting mail-bag on the ^^Cedric" and the ^'Oceanic" 
is his memorial ; The Hague Tribunal is his memorial. 
But where is Connecticut's monument to this great 
servant? Where is ours? When the last brigadier has 
had his bronze, and the last commodore, may we not 
hope for it ? 

The labors of men associated with our Peace Society 
have done more than any other to create the spirit 
which has made America's record in international 
arbitration the proudest in the world. The now great 
and influential International Law Association grew 
from its initiative. It has worked steadily for two 
generations for the tribunal finally created at The 
Hague ; and at its initiative the Massachusetts Legisla- 
ture at its last session unanimously passed a resolution 
asking our government to cooperate with the govern- 
ments of Europe in establishing a stated International 
Congress, from which in the fulness of time it is hoped 



60 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

will develop the organization which will perform in 
some manner for the world legislatively the functions 
performed judicially by The Hague Tribunal. At The 
Hague Conference itself, no delegation achieved more 
than that of the United States. Its members have 
borne witness that their strength and influence were 
due largely to the strong support and the earnestness 
of public opinion here. No meetings in behalf of the 
cause in those critical days were so important as those 
here in Boston ; and no individual American did so 
much as Boston's grand old man, Edward Everett Hale, 
who, going up and down the country, working with 
voice and pen, speaking often three times a day, made 
younger men blush by his untiring energy and devotion. 
Such briefly is the record of the constructive services 
of our Commonwealth and city in behalf of the world's 
peace and order. Surely there is not in our proud 
history any prouder chapter ; and surely if, as we are 
encouraged to hope, the International Peace Congress 
should next year honor the United States by making it 
the place of its session, no city has higher claim and 
title to its tabernacle than the city of Sumner and 
Channing and Samuel Adams. Should it come to us 
here, its word would be but another word of the great 
democratic message of the ^^ Father of the American 
Eevolution." By fortunate fatality, the name, Eobert 
Treat Paine, borne by the president now and for many 
years of the American Peace Society, is the same borne 
by one of the Massachusetts signers of the Declaration 
of Independence ; and the ideal and purpose for human- 
ity of the Peace movement in the world is at its heart 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 61 

the same which animated Jefferson and Washington 
and those who labored with them, whose memory we 
celebrate to-day. 

What are we doing to make war to-morrow and the 
next day difficult and unlikely ? What are we doing 
to invite it — to feed the jealousy, resentment and dis- 
trust which threaten it and make it easy ? Nations, 
like men, gain slowly a true sense of values, of rela- 
tions, of fitness, of cause and effect. Half of our 
people fail to see that, when nations themselves prac- 
tice lynch law, they should expect to see lynch law 
among their people and lawlessness in their great 
corporations, among their workers, and in their city 
halls. Sanction the torture of men by your soldiers at 
the antipodes, apologize for it, stigmatize the damna- 
tion of it, and to-morrow your fellow-citizens, with the 
sheriff's privity and parson's benediction, shall be burn- 
ing men in your back-yard. As a nation we have not 
yet learned the unfitness, the irritation to the sister 
nation, party to the contention, of appointing our noto- 
riously defiant, declared and committed men to place 
upon arbitration commissions — as in the Alaska Boun- 
dary case. 

Most of our people fail to see that half of our tempta- 
tion to militarism and a great navy comes from the 
prostitution of our vaunted Monroe Doctrine to the pur- 
poses of a dog-in-the-manger commercialism ; half of 
the rest is the penalty of our own deed in the Pacific, 
from whose consequences as well as guilt a manly rep- 
aration would go far to free us. What was our Mon- 
roe Doctrine for ? What were Monroe and John Quincy 



62 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

Adams thinking about in 1823? They were simply- 
planning how to save the little South American repub- 
lics from the incursions of three or four European 
despotisms, and give them a chance in their political 
experiment. But the conditions of 1823 have utterly 
changed. I could not describe the change so well as 
Whitelaw Eeid described it in his speech at Yale 
University a fortnight ago, in which, reflecting upon 
the general ignorance of the origin and history of the 
Monroe Doctrine, he said of its condition to-day : ' * It 
resembles that of a long-neglected barrel around which 
has accumulated the debris of years. The hoops, the 
thing that made it a barrel, have dropped away ; only 
the pressure of the debris outside holds the staves 
together." So it is. The Secretary of the Navy 
bluntly said to the students at Harvard, a month before, 
that the doctrine had lost its ^ ' political significance " — 
the only worthy or real significance it ever had ; yet in 
behalf of some '' significance " of the doctrine, which 
he did not undertake to define, he boasted that the 
Navy, although he remarked that the people had 
probably not observed it — and it is edifying to note 
this joyful independence of the people's knowledge on 
the part of a powerful branch of service in our 
democracy — was making an impressive demonstration 
in the Caribbean waters a central feature of its regu- 
lar "policy." We hear the refusal of permission to 
the grant of an island in the West Indies to Germany 
defended on the ground that it would be a menace to 
us in case of war ; the natural commercial and construc- 
tive needs of a great people are made to yield to con- 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 63 

siderations of some possible contingency of war. Mean- 
time, South America is an almost empty continent, of 
limitless resources and invitations, in a crowded world ; 
and what sensible American, free from political supersti- 
tion and national greed, does not know that Englishmen 
and Frenchmen and Germans are as good as Portuguese 
or Spaniards, that the interests of law and liberty and 
progress to-day are, mildly speaking, equally safe in 
their hands, and that if, in some vicissitude or fluctuation 
of political fortune, a hundred millions of them should 
pour into Venezuela and Brazil and ground their insti- 
tutions there, it would be a blessing to the world ? In 
a word, 1903 is not 1823 ; the theory any longer of a 
world of two hemispheres, for political purposes or any 
other, breaks down at every point, tempts us to mon- 
strous and grotesque iniquities and wastes, and accuses 
our common sense. The ocean is not now a barrier, 
but a bridge ; and we have precisely the obligations, 
and no other, to Paraguay and Patagonia, which we 
have to Holland, Turkey and Japan. This, I think, 
is what John Quincy Adams — more than James Mon- 
roe, the father of the Monroe Doctrine — would say if 
he were back in Faneuil Hall, where his portrait looks 
down upon us. He would tell us to clear our minds of 
cant ; he would tell us, with Lowell, that new occa- 
sions teach new duties ; he would tell us, with Emer- 
son, to 

bid the broad Atlantic roll, 
A ferry of the free, — 

since a ferry is what it now is and ought to be. While 
he was yet with us he said : * ' Let it be impressed 



64 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

upon the heart of every one of you, impress it upon 
the minds of your children, that the total abolition of 
war on earth is entirely dependent on man's own will 
— the ills of war are all of his own creation " ; and 
were he with us to-day, I think he would add that the 
first condition of keeping out of war is to face the facts, 
and that if we choose to go on living as if it were still 
1823, multiplying battleships upon that basis and getting 
into miserable wars as the natural and necessary result, 
the fault will not be with our stars, but with ourselves. 
One hundred and one years ago, the Fourth of July 
oration in this place was given by the father of Ralph 
Waldo Emerson. One hundred years ago this year, 
Ralph Waldo Emerson was born. We cannot forget 
here the sacred and oracular centennial. Emerson 
has illuminated for us as no other the natural and 
inalienable rights of man, the principles of the found- 
ers of the republic, and the high and holy standards 
ordained for us here in his city and ours by her noble 
history and traditions. Our whole great group of Mas- 
sachusetts poets, Emerson, Bryant, Whittier, Holmes, 
Longfellow and Lowell, have sung together the song of 
peace and order and humanity ; all alike have ceased 
to be quoted for our national purposes in the last five 
years. Sumner well said that the highest value of the 
arsenal at Springfield will ever be in the fact that it 
inspired the verse of Longfellow : 

Were half the power that fills the world with terror, 
Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, 

Given to redeem the human mind from error, 
There were no need of arsenals or forts. 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 65 

It was Whittier who greeted in most prophetic strain 
the Peace Convention at Brussels. It was Lowell who 
smote with loftiest spirit the indulgence of any patriot- 
ism which blinds the patriot to his duties to humanity. 

Where'er a single slave doth pine, 

Where'er one man may help another, — 
Thank God for such a birthright, brother, — 

That spot of earth is thine and mine ! 

There is the true man's birthplace grand ; 

His is a world-wide fatherland ! 

But it was Emerson who put into words most power- 
ful our obligations as Americans and as men. He paid 
the most memorable tribute ever paid in a single 
phrase to the Declaration of Independence. When 
Rufus Choate, speaking in the spirit which has again 
become fashionable among us in this latest time, 
slurred the Declaration as a mass of ' ' glittering gener- 
alities," Emerson took up the taunt with quick resent- 
ment and exclaimed : * ' ^ Glittering generalities I ' Say 
rather, Blazing ubiquities ! " Who had such faith 
as he in the destiny of the republic, who watched so 
anxiously its fortune, who felt so buoyantly its oppor- 
tunities, who was so sensible of its world power, and 
who rebuked so plainly its misuse of power? It seems 
as if those famous old Fourth of July lines of his were 
written for us now : 

United States ! the ages plead, — 
Present and Past, in under song, — 

Go put your creed into your deed. 
Nor speak with double tongue. 



66 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

For sea and land don't understand, 

Nor skies without a frown 
See rights for which the one hand fights 

By the other cloven down. 

Nations, he said, die of suicide, and the sign of 
decay is want of thought. He dreaded rehance upon 
materialities and physical force instead of appeal to 
the spiritual arm. He saw '^the bankruptcy of the 
vulgar musket- worship." '^ Is the armed man the only 
hero " ? he asked. It was in Boston, in his opening 
lecture on the Philosophy of History, in 1836, that he 
urged that our histories, then so largely monopolized by 
the chronicles of wars, should give some proper prom- 
inence to ^' other of man's social relations besides his 
conspiracies to stab and steal." It was in Boston that 
he gave first that noble address on War, which every 
Boston citizen and every American should keep ever on 
his table. "War, to sane men at the present day," 
he said, "begins to look like an epidemic insanity, 
breaking out here and there like the cholera or influ- 
enza, infecting men's brains instead of their bowels." 
^ ' War is fratricide, " and ' ' sympathy with it is a juve- 
nile and temporary state." "Would not love answer 
the same end, or even a better " ? He rejoiced at the 
proposition in Boston in his time of the Congress of 
Nations ; he rejoiced that the movement began here. 
" Not in a feudal Europe," he exclaimed, "but in this 
broad America of God and man, — here we ask, Shall 
it be War, or shall it be Peace " ? 

Boston has as yet found no place for a monument to 
her greatest son, although she has reared statues of 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 67 

General Glover and Colonel Cass. But Emerson can 
wait. He honored Boston by naming the noble poem 
in which he chants God's call and revelation to the 
founders of New England ''The Boston Hymn." The 
poem ''Boston" is at once a celebration of the spirit 
of the Revolution and of this " darling town of ours " ; 
and the loyal and loving lecture on ' ' Boston "is an 
appeal like that of Demosthenes, that reverence for a 
noble past shall be the inspiration of as noble days to 
come. "This town of Boston has a history. ... It 
is a seat of humanity, of men of principle, obeying a 
sentiment ; so that its annals are great historical lines, 
inextricably national, part of the history of political 
liberty. . . . What public souls have lived here, what 
social benefactors ! " He believed proudly that this was 
' ' the town which was appointed in the destiny of 
nations to lead the civilization of North America " ; 
but he knew that she would continue to "teach the 
teachers and rule the rulers of America " only so long 
as she ' ' cleaves to her liberty, her education, and her 
spiritual faith." She "owes her existence and her 
power to principles not of yesterday " ; and to these 
principles it is her vocation to continue to witness. 
"Let her stand fast by herself!" "Let every child 
that is born of her and every child of her adoption see 
to it to keep the name of Boston as clean as the sun " ; 
and the high pledge of that is the prayer with which 
the "Boston" lecture and the "Boston" poem alike 
conclude : "As with our fathers, so God be with us ! " 
It was an auspicious coincidence by which at the 
same time that we celebrated the centennial of Emerson 



68 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

we celebrated the centennial of the beginning of Chan- 
ning's ministry in Boston and dedicated his statue. 
The president of our great university did not fail to 
emphasize at the dedication the standards of political 
morality which Channing set up, from which in certain 
respects the country has recently fallen away. ^' Chan- 
ning, " he said, ^^ taught that no real good can come 
through violence, injustice, greed, and the inculcation 
of hatred and enmities, or of suspicions and contempts. 
He believed that public well-being can be promoted 
only through public justice, freedom, peace, and good- 
will among men. He never could have imagined that 
there would be an outburst in his dear country, grown 
rich and strong, of such doctrines as that the might of 
arms or possessions or majorities make right ; that a 
superior civilization may rightly force itself on an 
inferior by wholesale killing, hurting, and impoverish- 
ing ; that an extension of commerce or of missionary 
activities justifies war ; that the example of imperial 
Eome is an instructive one for republican America; 
and that the right to liberty and the brotherhood of 
man are obsolete sentimentalities." Public justice, 
freedom, peace, and good-will among men, political 
morality, — thank God for this noble figure, gracious 
and severe, which from this day on through the genera- 
tions is to stand in our midst, reminding Boston of the 
sacred principles not of yesterday to which she owes 
her existence and her power ! No preacher and no 
citizen ever taught her better what war means, what 
true and false patriotism are, what the men are and 
the deeds which it becomes a truly enlightened com- 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 69 

munity to celebrate, what constitutes the true grandeur 
of nations, and what this nation and the world might 
be if Christian ministers and Christian churches would 
combine to act on Christian principles. Demosthenes' 
oration on ''The Crown" was a proud review of his 
own public life, to answer those who would refuse him 
the golden crown which had been proposed as a recogni- 
tion and reward of his great services. Could we think 
Athenian usage into Boston, and think philippics 
into the mouth of the saintly Channing, it were easy 
to summon the stirring rehearsal by which he would 
shame a Commonwealth which makes illustrious citi- 
zens wait for their crown while she dots a hundred 
commons with bronze corporals and colonels. 

By another didactic coincidence, the month which 
began here with the dedication of the statue of Chan- 
ning ended with the dedication of the statue of General 
Hooker. The one had no official recognition, had little 
public notice, was in plainness and quiet by the few. 
For the other, every public building blazed, every flag 
fluttered, every shop was closed, every street thronged, 
every official in procession, and the pavements echoed 
the tread of twenty thousand men. 

Do we criticise this honor to the great captain of the 
Civil War ? We rejoice in it. We exult in the memo- 
ries of Gettysburg and of Bunker Hill. The republic 
honors her chivalric soldiers. There have been right- 
eous and necessary wars. ''The cause of peace," said 
Emerson, ' ' is not the cause of cowardice. If peace is 
sought to be defended or preserved for the safety of 
the luxurious and the timid, it is a sham, and the 



70 THE PKINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

peace will be base ; war is better. If peace is to be 
maintained, it must be by brave men, who have come up 
to the same height as the hero, but who have gone one 
step beyond the hero ! " Howells has told us that there 
are greater words than patriotism, and among them are 
civilization and humanity. So there are greater words 
than peace, and among them are justice and honor. 
Even the wisdom which is from above — so St. James 
preached, and so I believe — is first pure, and then peace- 
able. As lovers of our country, we honor General 
Hooker as its brave defender. As haters of the war 
spirit, we honor him for hating it. He is the standing 
rebuke of every swaggerer and ruffler, and of every 
battlefield save that of sternest duty. His famous ex- 
clamation; ''Fighting Joe Hooker sounds to me like 
Fighting Fool ! " will go ringing down our history with 
Sherman's ' ' War is hell ! " What I say is that Hooker's 
services for America, for good citizenship, for pure 
patriotism, for high political inspiration and imperative, 
as compared with Channing's, were but as one to a 
thousand, and that the degree and manner of our recog- 
nition of the two are the measure of our poor estimate 
of values and the rudeness of our civilization up to date. 
By yet another eloquent coincidence, just as the great 
military procession leaves us, there enters the city the 
greatest host of teachers which has ever gathered in our 
history, or in human history. Boston welcomes them 
to her heart of hearts. Lift up your heads, ye gates; 
even lift them up, ye everlasting doors ! And learn, 
beautiful, our country, — through whatever falls or 
stumblings, still ever the great centre of our hope, our 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 71 

confidence and our devotion, — learn where to look for 
the better heart and mind and the sure salvation. 

*^ Let the soldier be abroad if he will, " — so exclaimed 
Lord Brougham seventy years ago ; — ^ 'he can do nothing 
in this age. There is another personage, a personage 
less imposing in the eyes of some : the schoolmaster is 
abroad, and I trust to him, armed with the primer, 
against the soldier in full military array." The school- 
master is abroad ! — and the schoolmaster means reason 
and peace. By happy parable, the very room in the old 
house on Beacon street in which the president of this 
great convention, the president of Harvard University, 
was born is to-day the office of the American Peace 
Society. Every public school in the land shall soon be 
a peace society. The teacher everywhere begins to ask : 
Whereto this wickedness and waste ? In Chicago the 
teachers of the public schools league themselves to- 
gether and say to the City Hall : Make the rogues pay 
their honest taxes, and you can pay us honest wages ; — 
and, to prove their thesis, themselves bring suit against 
the rogues, and turn two million dollars into the treas- 
ury. Now, say they, force your street railways to 
make proper payment for their franchises, and turn 
in ten millions more. Thus, in that great city, the 
teacher leads in the constructive way. * ' More Money 
for the Public Schools " President Eliot writes a whole 
book to demand; while meantime a billion dollars are 
thrown away in reckless war. The cost of one great 
battleship would build the whole hundred buildings of 
Harvard University, with a million dollars to spare ; 
while the battleship, if perhaps it serve us well, — with 



72 THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 

Christ's eyes we should see it clearer, — may by new 
invention be made junk to-morrow ; if it serve us ill, 
will help us into some collision from which, without it. 
Christian courtesy and common sense would probably 
have saved us. Surely we do not need much higher 
mathematics nor much higher morals than those already 
current in our schools to put this and that together. 
The schoolmaster will put them together ; and to-mor- 
row the result shall find place in the curriculum. 

'*The only substitute for a strong police in a free 
country," wrote President Dwight, a hundred years 
ago, ^^is a more virtuous and thorough education of 
children." "We must," said Emerson, "supersede 
politics by education." The only way to save the bil- 
lions wasted in wicked wars is to spend them on con- 
structive things ; and the time has come for the teachers 
of America to see and with power to say, in presence 
of the nation's awful needs, that a civilization which 
has come so far as to be able to produce and understand 
a Lincoln and an Emerson is, in spending a billion 
dollars as we have spent our last, sinning against its 
own light and against humanity, — if it persists in 
such policies, sinning against the Holy Ghost. The 
Baroness von Suttner, the wise and tactful author of 
"Lay Down Your Arms ! " the book which has gone to 
the hearts of men and women in our time more pene- 
tratingly than any other impeachment of the war sys- 
tem, has been credited in Europe with the power " to 
convert diplomats in a few weeks into human beings. " 
There are few things for which America has greater 
reason to be proud than that her own diplomats, from 



THE PRINCIPLES OF THE FOUNDERS 73 

the time of Benjamin Franklin and John Jay to the time 
of John W. Foster and Andrew D. White, have been 
exerting in eminent degree precisely that same power. 
Let the teachers of America, the women of America, 
and the churches of America once highly resolve to- 
gether that this republic shall henceforth act always 
like a human being to human beings, and that thing 
shall surely come to pass. And where is the fitting 
place for that triune consecration but this home of 
Horace Mann, of Lucy Stone, and of Channing ? Let 
it begin here ! The war spirit indeed is doomed. Its 
momentary appearance among ourselves is an anachro- 
nism. ^'AU history," says Emerson, "is the decline of 
war, though the slow decline." There was not half so 
much war in the world in the nineteenth century as 
in the eighteenth. Let every teacher in the school 
and every faithful man and woman in the home unite 
in the decree that this century's record shall be brighter 
stiU. Let this republic be indeed the prime world power 
of a new era, and dare, as Jefferson aspired, " to legis- 
late as if eternal peace were at hand." And let our 
own beloved city still revere with Emerson, and still 
valiantly obey, humbly recognizing its severe condition, 
the destiny which appointed it to lead the civilization 
of the continent, the high and holy destiny of the prin- 
ciples not of yesterday to which it owes its existence 
and its power. 



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